Maybe Chris Cunningham is having a bit of fun. Or maybe the Augusta, Ga., restaurateur is serious. Whatever the case, he’s got many Georgians — and others around the nation — talking about his Flip the Birds campaign to remove the brown thrasher as Georgia’s state bird and replace it with the Cornish chicken.

On the one hand, the effort seems quite earnest. Mr. Cunningham, whose Wife Saver restaurants serve about $1 million worth of chicken annually, has established a Web site (www.flipthebirds.com) filled with useful information. It has attracted a great deal of traffic and prompted more than 2,000 signatures on a state bird recall petition. Mr. Cunningham marshals an impressive array of facts to support his campaign.

He notes that the chicken is vital to the state’s economy. He’s correct. The state produces 1.4 billion chickens a year, more than any other state. If Georgia were a country, only the United States, China and Brazil would rank ahead of it in terms of chicken production. The poultry and egg business has an $18.4 billion-a-year impact on the state and it directly or indirectly provides employment for more than 120,000 people. Mr. Cunningham says that alone should spur serious talk about changing the state bird.

Still, some wonder if the Flip the Birds campaign is for real, or, if it is, as one writer put it, a “tongue-in-beak” effort. Consider the campaign’s origin. Mr. Cunningham says he got the idea for making the chicken the state bird while sitting on his porch, sipping a cocktail and watching brown thrashers hop around his yard. Many a scheme, of course, has been fueled by a cocktail, or two, but that doesn’t necessarily make it a good idea.

The Flip the Birds effort has attracted enough attention to spark a counter-campaign and a petition to keep the brown thrasher as the state bird. The Georgia Conservancy points out that the thrasher, a ground-dwelling songbird with a repertoire of more than 3,000 distinct vocalizations, has served honorably. It was chosen by schoolchildren in 1935 and reaffirmed by the state legislature in 1970. The back-and-forth chatter between pro-chicken and pro-thrasher forces can be a bit pointed, and entertaining.

Pro-chicken folk say the brown thrasher leaves the state for warmer climes every winter. That, they say, is enough to disqualify it. The Conservancy replies that the state bird should be one that is embraced by the people rather than one that is, ahem, ingested by them.

So far, the question is moot. There is no bill to change the state bird before the legislature. The status quo should prevail. While debate on the topic might prove entertaining, it would be a distraction. Georgia faces too many problems — budget shortfalls, education woes, infrastructure needs, unemployment to name but a few — for legislators to be distracted by a topic that is, at best, more a light diversion than a serious matter of public interest.